Cuba: A Journey/Cuba and the United States
White, Robert E.
BOOKS A miss and a hit on Cuba / n this report on Castro's Cuba, Jacobo Timerman acts as the pros- ecuting attorney building a case, not as the judge weighing evi- dence. Angered by the many...
...ambassador to El Salvador during the Carter administration, is president of the International Center for Development Policy in Washington, D.C...
...This subservience offended the pride of patria in all but the most craven of Cubans...
...Just how marginal, I can testify from experience...
...Robert E. White progress of the revolution, he has found an apt target...
...These unworthy stratagems have not only failed to bring down Castro, they have cast Fidel in the role of David to our Goliath and have made Cubans more defiant, more PRIESTS & SEX A SECRET WORLD Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy A.W...
...He extensively quotes the gifted but picaresque author, Miguel Barnet, a man who spends most of his time outside of Cuba, or, even more inexplica- bly, the eccentric Fernando Birri, the Argentine director of the Cuban film school, whom Timerman finds interesting, apparently because they were schoolmates in Buenos Aires...
...When Timerman hammers at Castro for the imprisonment of that noble defender of human rights, Elisardo Sanchez, he is on rock-solid ground...
...wants blood to run in the streets and Castro's head on a pike...
...We understand the United States and like Americans...
...The author argues, for example, that Fidel's supposed omniscience forces Cuban officials to mask failures and to rationalize absurdities...
...Several years ago, another high official, after a night when the drinks flowed freely, asked me if it was possible that the United States would ever come to its senses and change its destructive policies...
...Angered by the many examples he finds of abuses of power by the Cuban government, Timerman goes after Fidel Castro with the hammer of sar- casm and the tongs of ridicule...
...To us, they are beings from another planet...
...If the United States would end the embargo and permit normal commerce, travel, and communication, then Fidel Castro might well produce a tropical version of pere-stroika, if, however, President George Bush continues to make speeches about "a rev- olution betrayed" and calls for wider and more effective sanctions, he will only suc- ceed in reinvigorating the tired theme of patria o muerte...
...Instead, Timerman devotes pages to the views of those who play at best a marginal role in Cuba...
...lose our revolution but we do know that change should come and the only man capable of presiding over that change is Fidel...
...I politely advised the caller to communicate with the Cuban embassy and he, equally politely, told me that the embassy had told him that Cuban tariffs were set by the U.S...
...Yet, except for a couple of inconsequential quotes from Vice-president Carlos Rafael Rodr/guez, Timerman gives us nothing--nothing whatsoever---of the substance of the dis- cussions he had with these Cuban leaders...
...Two years later, I served as a very junior member of our delegation to the United Nations...
...Timerman's candor has paid off hand- somely...
...It is true that pressures for ideological conformity frequently force Cuban leaders who know better to mouth stock answers to probing questions...
...Editor and publisher of an important Buenos Aires newspaper, the author is also a self-declared socialist and man of the Left who suffered torture and imprisonment at the hands of Argentina's military rulers...
...there are sweeping generalizations but only rarely facts to back them up...
...The best way to expose this hypocrisy and con- formity would have been to demonstrate these officials' inability to respond effec- tively to Timerman's arguments...
...With the country up for sale, organized crime took over Havana and turned it into a city of rampant vice with drugs sold openly in the gambling houses and with fourteen-year- old prostitutes of both sexes roaming the streets...
...University of Georgia Press, $15, 314 pp...
...We want a civilized relationship with our big neighbor...
...During his stay in Cuba, Timerman inter- viewed some of the most able and articulate defenders of the revolution: Vice-President Carlos Rafael Rodr/guez, for example, and the talented author, Pablo Armando Fernandez, as well as the tough-minded vice-minister of foreign affairs, Ricardo Alarcon...
...BOOKS A miss and a hit on Cuba / n this report on Castro's Cuba, Jacobo Timerman acts as the pros- ecuting attorney building a case, not as the judge weighing evi- dence...
...No matter how profoundly I may have disagreed with them, I have always had to admire their ability to defend the revolution with elo- quence and conviction...
...Cuba today can be under- stood only in this historical context--a con- text that the Timerman book conspicuously fails to provide...
...As I know from many hours of dialogue with them, these men delight in no-holds-barred argument...
...We want to rejoin the West...
...We need a break," he said...
...Widely published examples of pedophilia, sexual relationships, and concealed mar- riages have spotlighted the vulnerable sex- uality of the clergy...
...There are no examples, none, of this sort of candor and eloquence either from Cuban government officials or from those artists and intellectuals who passionately defend .the revolution, sometimes with tears in their eyes at its follies and stupidities...
...As Louis P6rez makes clear in his excellent history of U.S.-Cuban relations, "Cuba was reduced to marginal participation in the conduct of the affairs of their own state...
...government...
...In recounting the history of the "ties of singular intimacy," Perez tells us that what goes on in Cuba is very much a function of what goes on with the United States...
...Yet in spite of Timerman's great powers of observation and incisive prose, this book is less than the sum of its parts...
...JAMES J. GILL, S.J., M.D., is senior consul- tant in psychiatry at the Institute of Living, Hartford, Connecticut...
...We are ready to deal but the U.S...
...It is dif- ficult to avoid the conclusion that Timerman's silencing of the revolution's leaders in his book equates to the censorship he so rightly condemns...
...To help readers understand the celibacy requirement attached to the priesthood, the determined to keep their revolution and to spit in the eye of the neighboring giant regardless of the costs in civil liberties and human rights...
...During my first week there, President Batista's ambassador sought me out and, in the most fawning manner, told me that he and the entire Cuban delegation existed to serve the interest of United States foreign policy and that he and his entire staff were at my disposition...
...James J. Gill p eople both within and out- side the Catholic church are today all too aware of the limitations and weak- nesses of its priests...
...CUBA AND THE UNITED STATES Ties of Singular Intimacy Louis A. P6rez, Jr...
...In my innocence, I expressed disbelief but checked and found that indeed the Cuban tariff schedule was maintained and regulated by a midlevel bureaucrat in the Department of State...
...But probably the most sur- prised and embarrassed of all are the bish- ops and seminary formation personnel who, after providing years of intense for- mation, approved and ordained the men who eventually misbehaved sexually...
...In the calm, detached manner befitting a historian, P6rez notes that in thirty years since the revolution, United States foreign policy toward Cuba has included eight plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the strangula- tion of Cuban commerce by the blocking of international credits and threats of retal- iation against other countries unless they cut off trade with Cuba, and sabotage of the economy by bribing foreign manufac- turers to ship Cuba defective machinery and spare parts...
...Richard Sipe Brunner/Mazel, Inc., $29.95, 324 pp...
...In 1956, I was a newly minted foreign service officer serving in the trade agreements section of the Department of State...
...Richard Sipe has contributed A Secret WorM: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy...
...This book reports the results of his inves- tigations...
...During my first month on the job, an American businessman telephoned to ask about the duty on a particular product in the Cuban tariff schedule...
...When he lashes out against the hypocrisy of a servile press that suffocates the reader with uninterrupt- ed paeans of praise for the triumphant 108: Commonweal CUBA...
...There are anecdotes but little connective tissue...
...we can neither understand nor relate to the Russians...
...As the P6rez history demonstrates, the way of the revolution was prepared by the con- stant intervention of the United States, which undermined the capacity of the Cubans to govern themselves...
...All the reviews that have come to my attention have given unstinting praise to this slim, random, anecdotal indictment of the Cuban revolution...
...The author is a counselor and educator who, for more than twenty-five years, has been studying the sexual lives of his clients and pupils...
...It contains a wealth of informa- tion that will be valuable to persons involved in the formation of priests, both before ordination and afterward...
...Of special worth is the initial section of the book which illuminates the origins of celibacy as a requirement for priesthood, discusses the various meanings of celibacy, and emphasizes the difficult task priests face when they take on this obligation in the context of an unappreciative culture and a church which "does itself a grave disservice as well as personal injustice by requiring the practice of celibacy without 8 February 1991:109...
...Far too clever to pretend an impartiality he does not feel, the author tries to make a virtue of his fury at a revolution he believes has been betrayed...
...His insights and opinions, therefore, merit attention and respect...
...He has fought hard and effectively for democracy and human rights all over the world...
...Yet with courtesy and patience it is possible to elicit authentic responses to legitimate concerns...
...Until the Castro revolution of 1959, Cuba functioned as a colony of the United States...
...We don't want, however, to REVIEWERS ROBERT E. WHITE, U.S...
...variety of sexual practices in which some priests are currently engaged, and what steps a successful accomplishment of life- long chastity requires, A.W...
...After an hour of spirited give-and-take, Vice-President Rodrfguez told me that Cuba has the worst press in the world, grumbled that he would accept any office in Cuba except editor of Granma, the official newspaper, and said that denial of free expression was one of the worst failures of the revolution...
...A JOURNEY Jacobo Timerman Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, 125 pp...
...Timerman contemptuously dismisses the "objectivity" of certain observers as "at best childish ambivalence and all too often obsequiousness...
...Reviews in the New York Times sounded an almost exultant note, as if this search and destroy mission by an authentic hero of the Left somehow absolved American liberals from any resid- ual guilt they might feel about a United States foreign policy that for thirty years has dedicated itself to the isolation and destruction of the Cuban government and economy...
...Most lay persons, and perhaps the majority of priests, have been shocked at the extent of these violations of celibacy...
...It also contains a flaw so obvious and so self- destructive that the book has already drawn severe criticism...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 3
